The college applications were mailed over the holidays to a dozen ZIP codes -- 08544, 27706, 70118, 94720, and others. Next September, the older son will be somewhere else. Maybe he'll be 3,000 miles away, maybe nearby, but he won't be in the back...

Last week, scientists at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Toronto gave the universe another 100 trillion pretty good years. Too bad the report didn't stop there. University of Michigan researchers Fred Adams and Gregory Laughlin looked ahead tens of thousands of trillions...

American filmmaker (b. Feb. 20, 1925, Kansas City, Mo. —d. Nov. 20, 2006, Los Angeles, Calif. ), was an unconventional and independent director whose works emphasized character and atmosphere over plot in exploring themes of innocence, corruption, and survival. Perhaps his best-known film was his...

Years have vintages too: It doesn’t take a sommelier to recommend a 1776, an 1815, a 1989. Conversely, who’d want to lay in a year like, let us say, 1973? It’s the nadir of that supposed nadir of decades, the 1970’s. Watergate roiled the nation....

In the following essay, Ferncase discusses Altman's retelling of the story of Philip Marlowe in his The Long Goodbye.

In the following mixed review, Baumbach complains that, "what's finally wrong with The Long Goodbye is that for all its artistic pretensions, all of them, the film is not quite serious, not serious enough to carry the freight of its pretensions."

[My] biggest problem with Altman has arisen with his anti-genre derision in "The Long Good-bye" and "Buffalo Bill." I am not saying that Altman or any modern filmmaker should revere genre or even narrative. One may bypass it, but it is futile and unseemly to ridicule it. At times Altman evokes late Bergman's skepticism toward all forms of dramatic discourse, but in "Buffalo Bill," particularly, Altman has not devised an adequate substitute for the dramatic di...